Note: This is a slightly modified version of an article that was published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 34, No. 1, January/Februrary 2010. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Nope. Not true. Exactly backwards. Think about it. When you go to a doctor with a fever, does he just treat the symptom? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the fever and if it’s pneumonia, he identifies which microbe is responsible and gives you the right drugs to treat that particular infection. If you have abdominal pain, does the doctor just give you narcotics to treat the symptom of pain? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the pain and if he determines you have acute appendicitis he operates to remove your appendix.

I guess what they’re trying to say is that something must have been wrong in the first place to allow the disease to develop. But they don’t have any better insight into what that something might be than scientific medicine does. All they have is wild, imaginative guesses. And they all disagree with one another. The chiropractor says if your spine is in proper alignment you can’t get sick. Acupuncturists talk about the proper flow of qi through the meridians. Energy medicine practitioners talk about disturbances in energy fields. Nutrition faddists claim that people who eat right won’t get sick. None of them can produce any evidence to support those claims. No alternative medicine has been scientifically shown to prevent disease or to cure it. If it had, it would have been incorporated into conventional medicine and would no longer be “alternative.”

Are these practitioners treating the underlying cause, or are they simply applying their one chosen tool to treat everything? Chiropractors treat every patient with chiropractic adjustments. What if a doctor used one treatment for everything? You have pneumonia? Here’s some penicillin. You have a broken leg? Here’s some penicillin. You have diabetes? Here’s some penicillin. Acupuncturists only know to stick needles in people. Homeopaths only know to give out ridiculously high dilutions that amount to nothing but water. Therapeutic touch practitioners only know to smooth out the wrinkles in imaginary energy fields. They are not trying to determine any underlying cause: they are just using one treatment indiscriminately. (more…)

Sometimes diagnosis is straightforward. If a woman has missed several periods and has a big belly with a fetal heartbeat, it’s pretty easy to diagnose pregnancy. But most of the time diagnosis is much more difficult. Alzheimer’s can’t be diagnosed for sure until the patient dies and you do an autopsy. If only we had one of those Star Trek gadgets to point at our patients and give us a quick and accurate answer! Alas! We are far from perfect. All too often, we really have no idea what’s causing a patient’s symptoms. We do a complete workup and still don’t know. What then?

We all know people who have symptoms that a series of doctors have failed to diagnose, who continue to doctor-shop, hoping to find that one doctor somewhere who will find something the others have missed. Occasionally they do; but far more often these people spend a great deal of time and money chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Sometimes as they are searching, the illness gradually runs its course and goes away. When this happens, whatever they tried last gets the undeserved credit for the “cure.” Sometimes the symptoms persist and these searches consume their life, encourage unhealthy self-absorption, and permanently ensconce them in the “sick” role.

One of the attractions of alternative medicine is that it offers far more certainty than scientific medicine. If your scientific doctor can’t see anything on x-rays, your chiropractor can. He’ll tell you he knows exactly what’s wrong: a subluxation that he can fix. Sherry Rogers will tell you all illness is due to toxins accumulating in your cells and you must “detoxify or die.” Hulda Clark will tell you it’s all parasites that she can eliminate with her magic zapper. Robert Young says the cause of all disease is acidosis. They all have confident, precise answers. Wrong ones.

The One Cause of All Disease?

It’s really easy to figure out what’s causing a patient’s symptoms if you believe there is one simple cause for all disease. While I was writing this I got sidetracked and searched the Internet for “the one cause of all disease.” I found a lot of them, including: (more…)